Posts Tagged “zcash”

If you are running a home node, then a single-board computer is an excellent choice due to its low power draw and the fact you can dedicate the low-cost machine to a single purpose. The Raspberry Pi, in particular, has been popularised for cryptocurrency nodes by the likes of the Casa Node and RaspiBlitz which constitute full Bitcoin/Litecoin and Lightning nodes.

While 2018 was largely dominated by the declining price of ZEC (and all major cryptocurrencies), it marked a significant milestone in the evolution of Zcash with both the Overwinter and Sapling network upgrades taking place. As a result, shielded transactions can now routinely be sent in a couple of seconds using a fraction of the RAM previously required (~40MB). Despite this, the percentage of shielded transactions on the network is still low, and as such, there is a greater emphasis on the adoption and usability of shielded transactions.

WinZEC (formerly Zcash4Win) was the first port of the official Zcash client (known as zcashd) to Windows. As a result, it still powers a large proportion of the Zcash nodes on the network for those who wish to use shielded transactions on a Windows machine. WinZEC is comprised of two major components, the Swing wallet GUI(the interface that you see when you open WinZEC) originally by vaklinov and the Windows port of zcashd by radix42.

2017 was an excellent year for Zcash as the protocol developed, matured, and the ecosystem expanded. The market-cap surpassed $1 Billion, and it is now well supported on various exchanges. There are many repeated concerns and sources of misinformation spread about Zcash and, while the technology is still in its infancy, it is rapidly evolving to actively address these concerns. Such concerns primarily focus on the nature of the trusted setup, the performance cost of completing a shielded transaction and the fact that private transactions are not mandatory for all Zcash transactions.

Zcash is a privacy-focussed decentralised cryptocurrency. Whereas in Bitcoin all transactions are public on the blockchain, so anyone can see and verify them, in Zcash when using shielded transactions, all amounts in addition to the sender and receiver are encrypted, and verification is completed through the use of zero-knowledge proofs.